‘Batman Ninja’ Anime Movie From ‘Afro Samurai’ Creator In Development

Move over, Batman: Gotham Knight – there’s a new anime version of the Caped Crusader in town. Batman Ninja, a new Batman direct-to-video movie reimagining the character as a ninja, is in development, with the creator of Afro Samurai at the helm.

ComicBook.com has discovered that Batman Ninja – which has yet to be formally announced – will be getting a panel at the New York Comic Con next month. A press statement about the panel reads as follows:

“Warner Bros. Japan and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment team for an eye-popping addition to the Batman animated legacy with Batman Ninja, a spectacular, all-new anime film coming in 2018. Be among the first to witness the premiere of colorful footage from this imaginative take on Batman and many of his connected characters. Panelists will include director Jumpei Mizusaki, character designer Takashi Okazaki, screenwriter Kazuki Nakashima, English-language screenwriters Leo Chu & Eric Garcia and some potential special guests.”

As mentioned earlier, Okazaki is best known for his work on Afro Samurai. In the meantime, Nakashima worked on both Kamen Rider Fourze and Kill La Kill, while Mizusaki worked on the anime adaptation of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.

6 Elseworlds Movies That DC Should Make For The Big Screen

Occasionally, there are times when comic book authors toss comic book continuity aside and straight-up create an alternate universe to tell brand new stories that bend the rules of the characters and radically change their settings as a side effect. DC calls these stories “Elseworlds,” and from the sound of things, DC is coming up with a plan to introduce that concept into their movie division with the standalone Joker movie set outside of the DC Extended Universe. The project, which has yet to be formally announced by Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment, is set in the 1980s and is styled after movies like Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (fitting, considering that Scorsese is producing the project). It should be noted that the DCEU is still in active development on a Joker & Harley Quinn project, featuring Jared Leto and Margot Robbie reprising their roles from Suicide Squad, following that movie’s unexpected cliffhanger.

Whether or not having a mix of creator-driven and shared-universe-driven narratives get developed at the same time will work, or whether audiences will be confused by it, remains to be seen. It certainly has worked for DC’s animated movies (as evident by most movies being their own thing while some — like Justice League: War and Teen Titans: The Judas Contract — share the same setting), but in an age of cinematic universes, this might be harder to pull off. The DC Elseworlds Multiverse, as we’ll call it for the sake of this article, has a lot of source material it could draw upon to tell one-off stories. While the DCEU will continue tell one big story about the return of the so-called Age of Heroes, the DCEM should be able to take advantage of the nature of self-contained stories and go completely nuts with them, embracing their radical departure from the source material and telling the kinds of stories we could never see in a shared universe.

Here are 6 stories that we think need to be brought to the big screen as part of Warner Bros. and DC’s Elseworlds-style universe. Click Next to get started.